I do not care for Jerry Falwell and hope that he never becomes President.
If
Falwell were elected, however, not much would change. The system of checks
and balances would reduce him to a goofy mouthpiece and after one term
the
informed electorate would replace him with a taller, better-looking man
with
a full head of hair.

The Left has always despised Falwell, and their latest calumny against
the man has attempted to label him as a Hindu Al Sharpton, blaming him
for a riot in India in which a number of people were killed. Aside from
the complete stupidity of blaming a man located several thousand miles
away for inciting a riot, the Left's treatment of Falwell's latest gaffe
has shown that the postmodern Left cannot even practice what it preaches.

A few weeks ago Falwell appeared on "60 Minutes" and stated
that Islam's prophet Muhammad "was a terrorist," whereupon the
Left immediately branded the man a bigot and after which the Indian riot
commenced. Falwell then made obeisance to the cult of tolerance/ diversity
by retracting his statement.

Of course, all in polite society agree that one should not make statements
that would offend others. Falwell certainly could have chosen better language
in discussing the topic at hand. But was Falwell intending to demean a
group of people? His exact statement that "Muhammad was a terrorist"
was not a prima facie racist/ xenophobic comment. Indeed, the statement
makes no theological claims regarding the content of Islam.
Instead, Fawell's comment identified one historical figure and made a
statement regarding the behavior of said figure, judging him to be a "terrorist."
Now isn't this what the postmodernists have asked us to do these past
forty years: to look at the past through the prism of the present and
conclude that Thomas Jefferson was a racist for owning slaves, that Adam
Smith and the Enlightenment philosophers propped up the white capitalist
power structure, and that Saint Augustine was little more than a misogynist?

If the PoMo Left truly had followed their own modus operandi, and looked
at the life of the prophet through modern sensibilities, they might have
noticed that Muhammad butchered a tribe of Jews living in Medina in 627
A.D./5 A.H. both as recompense for their earlier rejection of his theological
claims and in order to conquer the city. Perhaps if the "progressives"
had decided to read Bernard Lewis instead of trashing him they would not
have missed this incident.

Could one rationally conclude that this act could be classified a terrorist
action, and therefore committed by a terrorist? If one were to define
terrorism as the intentional killing of civilians or prisoners in the
pursuit of political ends then this act could be interpreted as a terrorist
action, and the perpetrator thereof concluded to be a terrorist. So, adopting
the 20/20 hindsight methodology of the Posties, one could conclude that
Muhammad could be defined as a terrorist (presuming one has not yet abandoned
rationality because of its status as a "power structure" of
Western Civ).

So where, then, is the error in Falwell's deduction? Has he not properly
engaged in the intellectual exercises prescribed by Foucault, Fish, Derrida,
Feyerabend et al.? He certainly has, and the hypocrisy of the postmodern
Left in criticizing the man for adopting their techniques is yet another
incident of the payment of tribute by vice to virtue inherent in hypocrisy.

The Left has been paying talent-sized tributes to virtue since last September.
For decades they cried against religious fundamentalists, railed against
sexism and homophobia, and warned us not to divide the world into "us"
and the "Other." Yet now they are uncomfortable in the current
war against a group of fanatics bent on killing homosexuals, keeping women
in the kitchen, and demarcating the world into the believer and the infidel.
Just this past week those who publicly proclaimed that the Maryland sniper
was an angry white loner of the McVeigh mold watched as their cherished
notions built on forty years of critical theory crumbled. You would think
that they would have learned something after watching nostrums such as
"poverty breeds terrorism" fall apart after it was revealed
that Atta and his pals were educated middle class jerks from the more
prosperous parts of the Middle East.

These levies are causing the Left to lose one of its truly brilliant
writers, the socialist Christopher Hitchens, who has announced that he
shall no longer write for The Nation magazine. He has been excoriated
by the Left since last September for daring to identify bin Laden and
his vermin for the detritus that they are. Hitchens - who has never wavered
in his dislike of both Ariel Sharon and the Islamists - was guilty only
of the crime of retaining his integrity by identifying and speaking against
what he perceived as evil.

But the Left's behavior runs deeper than mere hypocrisy. A central tenet
of postmodernism is that all beliefs, all epistemologies, all philosophies
- indeed, all models of thought - are inherently equal, with none better
than the other or able to make a claim to the "truth" with not
a one of them immune from the probes of critical theory. By attacking
Falwell for his comments, the Left is inherently placing Muhammad outside
of their analytical and deconstructive methods, making him immune from
the postmodern critique - and therefore placing him in one of those privileged
positions that the Posties have tried so very hard to abolish. It is truly
ironic that Hitchens' latest tome covers the subject of George Orwell,
who would have cracked a wry smile at the postmodernists' assertion that
"all alleged purveyors of truth are equal" while they simultaneously
admit that some are more equal than others.

One wonders what it will take for the postmodern Left to realize what
is truly at stake in the War against Islamofascism. Are they under the
delusion that an Islamist dictatorship a la Iran would allow them the
freedom to practice their deconstructionist nonsense afforded to them
under secular free-market democracy? If the Islamists win, those Leftists
who still retain religious belief may be accorded dhimmitude and will
live out their collective guilt as second-class citizens under a radical
interpretation of the shari'a. As for those who have adopted atheism or
paganism . . . well, perhaps they should check the prescribed treatment
of the unbeliever under the Islamist version of the shari'a before they
next howl over the "inequities" of the West.